


Meditations on a Monkey Suit

by AManAdrift



Series: Scenes from the Life of Phil Shepard [3]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: British Military, Gen, Military Backstory, Military Ranks, Military Uniforms, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 17:08:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16309268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AManAdrift/pseuds/AManAdrift
Summary: Phil Shepard wakes up and gets dressed in his new uniform as colonel-commandant of the Pegasus Corps.This vignette is a “deleted scene” fromChapter 12 of The Anti-Agathics War, with lots of detail about how I headcanon the Alliance military as working and a bit of character study for Phil, but I ultimately decided it was too slow for TAAW.  For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they will like…





	Meditations on a Monkey Suit

Shepard’s eyes opened as he awoke naturally, and then the first thing he chose to do, after the disorientation had worn off, was close them again and sigh over the fact that he was waking up alone. _Can the galaxy look after itself so I can go home, please?_ It was an unfair question in a lot of ways, but it crossed his mind anyway.

He got up, stretching stiff joints and grimacing, and looked out of the hotel room window over the estuary of the River Exe. A pleasant enough view, he had to admit: the next time ceremonial duties brought him back here, he resolved to bring Liara and the girls along to enjoy it.

After showering and attending to necessary duties in the bathroom, he forced himself to walk properly, powering his knees through their morning stiffness and out the other side. He picked up his omni-tool and cancelled the alarm he’d ended up anticipating, and with the half an hour or so he had in hand, he sat on the edge of the bed and eyed his uniform contemplatively rather than rushing to put it on.

It was laid out neatly on a valet stand: Shepard had been worried that his hosts might insist on providing him with a steward or something, but apparently he’d been reading too much historical fiction: British officers didn’t have those any more.

It was a new uniform, which was just as well, he had to admit: after fifty years out of harness, and getting increasingly enthusiastic about cookery, fitting into his old one would not have been an option even if protocol had allowed it. Fortunately contacts had directed him to a tiny hole-in-the-wall shop on the 56th floor of a tower in Shalta Ward, where a sympathetic and Savile-Row-level talented tailor had done magic to flatter and minimise his thickening middle, and had promised to run him up a set of Alliance blues on the same lines, in case he found himself needing them.

He stood and started to put the uniform on, pausing as he reached the tunic, and smiling a little as he examined the insignia. He had driven his staff to baroque extents of diplomatic phraseology fending off offers of honorary commissions and excessive post-retirement promotion, and they’d really done a superb job of translating his grumbles of “You can’t make an admiral out of someone who’s never commanded anything bigger than a frigate!” and “If I took commissions in every army or navy that offered me one, I’d have to sleep in the wardrobe and keep my uniforms in the bedroom!” This particular honorary appointment was different, though: accepting it was likely to cause an uptick in the number of offers again. _I really don’t pay you guys enough,_ he thought in the general direction of the Citadel.

Sometimes Shepard suspected that the enemy that armed forces spent the most of their time fighting was change. The nations of Earth maintained armies and at least token navies, even though seagoing vessels were pretty much the preserve of hobbyists and niche-exploiters, but many nations had transferred regiments, commands and especially air forces to the control of the Alliance, with hard-fought bureaucratic battles over who would pay for what, what bases and facilities would be handed over along with the organisations, and who would get promoted, transferred, retained or eased out in the process. The Royal Marines had shown that they were almost as formidable in this kind of political warfare as in the field, but their time had finally come.

Shepard had had half his military training in England, albeit at Alliance facilities, so out of idle curiosity he’d followed the course of the struggle in the official paperwork, but nothing more would have come of it, at least as far as concerned him, if a similar rearguard action against change hadn’t been being fought within the Alliance Marine Corps at the same time: Shepard’s own former unit, the Pegasus Brigade, was being dragged kicking and screaming into admitting that fast-flyby orbital insertions by unsupported infantry were very little more than a showy and expensive way to get Marines killed. Shepard himself had had a fairly spectacular share of proving that on Akuze, and to its credit the Alliance had responded promptly, replacing the old Grizzly armoured vehicles with drop-capable Makoes so that troops jumping in might at least have some extra firepower, but once humanity met the other races out there and got to know just how sophisticated their detection and early-warning systems really were, it quickly became apparent that orbital drop tactics as they’d originally been envisioned were not something a responsible general ought to employ outside very unusual circumstances. Still, for sixty years the Brigade had hung on in the Table of Organisation, principally because the Light Infantry part of the Orbital Insertion/Light Infantry course made them the equivalent of elite paratroopers, able to take the pressure off constantly overstretched spec-ops groups, for their more conventional missions at least. However, the time had finally come to scale drop training back radically, if not leave it as entirely the preserve of N7s and other jumpin’ fools. Some bright spark in the Alliance Defence Secretary’s office had spotted both changes in the offing, and said “Hey, you know who else are élite, nay, commando-trained troops?” It was at this point that Shepard had made his interest known.

Once that had happened, the government of the UK had been embarrassingly eager to have him as a high-profile and influential patron: they’d offered to commission him as the equivalent of a field marshal and make him ‘captain-general’ — honorary C.O. of the whole shooting match — but fortunately the Alliance had squelched that one before his staff could get started re-phrasing his immediate reaction: it turned out they weren’t thrilled about giving even honorary rank senior to every other officer in the Corps to a man who, when last he’d served on active duty as a Marine, as opposed to a naval officer, had been a corporal… A corporal who got every last member of his squad killed… and then came within an ace of being medically retired…

After a three-cornered negotiation between his office, the Alliance brass, and the Brits, things had finally shaken themselves out: the battle honours of the Royal Marines Commandos would be kept alive by the newly-formed Alliance Marine Commandos; the Pegasus Brigade would become the Pegasus Corps — a conveniently non-specific term that could cover any number of Marines, however small — and Shepard would accept another spurious post-retirement promotion and become Colonel-Commandant — i.e., honorary C.O. — of the Pegasus Corps within the Commandos. It was an arrangement Shepard was modestly pleased with, as it kept everybody happy: the British government could keep appointing those of its citizens who volunteered for the Commandos as Royal Marines, without putting itself to the expense of training them; the Alliance would get an influx of élite troops already trained to, and past, Marine standards, and his fellow OI/LI-trained boys and girls could pride themselves on being the élite of the élite, wearing their beloved maroon berets in amongst the green under the honorary leadership of The Oiliest Boy of Them All, Shepard thought mordantly — the nickname ‘Oily Boys’ had followed the official abbreviation of Orbital Insertion/Light Infantry as surely as night followed day.

Even the British Army was happy, Shepard remembered: the name and insignia of Pegasus bore witness to the fact that Britain had won one of the very early political skirmishes, as Earth’s governments vied for prestige and influence over the ethos of the Alliance service, but most governments had since found such victories to be white elephants: the Parachute Regiment still existed, and would be glad of the extra training space as the Pegasus Corps moved from Aldershot here, to what would now be called Commando Training Centre, Alliance Marines, Lympstone.

Shepard shook himself free of all this woolgathering, and shrugged his way into the navy-blue tunic, fastening its high collar and lifting his chin as he strove to settle his head comfortably over the crimson gorget patches: the Prince of Wales was staying on as Captain-General, RM, although the Alliance, as a supra-national organisation, had declined to create an extra-high rank just for him, and so the day’s ceremonies called for the very fanciest possible dress, which for a colonel-commandant was very fancy indeed, he thought only a little sourly as he wrapped the gold-and-crimson silk sash around his waist and fixed spurs to the heels of his high boots, which were mercifully covered by the overalls, which were themselves mercifully covered by the tunic, so the overall visual effect was actually very similar to the sensible black shoes and side-piped trousers of the equivalent Alliance uniform.

He looked left and right, pressing his chin uncomfortably against the tunic’s high collar as he checked that the gold shoulder cords that, among other things, distinguished a colonel-commandant from a run-of-the-mill colonel were straight, and found himself grinning. Like most Alliance Marines, he’d witnessed epic levels of bitching on the part of colonels from Earth or colonial military forces on attachment to Alliance units, complaining about being ‘demoted’ because the equivalent alliance rank was — Major. For Shepard it was even worse: on the one hand, he’d last seen active duty as a naval C.O., so arguably now that he was a four-striper his Alliance rank was Captain, but now that he was on the Table of Organisation as a Marine, equally arguably that made him a Major: Major (or possibly Captain) Colonel-Commandant Shepard. And of course, as far as most of the public was concerned he would always be ‘Commander Shepard’, which was why he hadn’t let them bump him past Staff Commander when he retired in the first place.

He looked at himself in the mirror as he settled the red-and-white peaked cap onto his head: the occasion was much too fancy for a beret, maroon or otherwise, but there was a tradition-hallowed place for his drop wings on the right sleeve. Most importantly, there were no ribands, stars or garters, or supererogatory bits of jewellery hung around his neck. He had insisted, through his staff, that as Councillor for humanity he couldn’t accept marks of favour from any individual government, so the medals on his breast were all his own: earned, not won, in the field as the smattering of red Wound Devices — ‘hard-way stars’ as they were colloquially known — pinned to the ribbons bore eloquent witness: rumours that Wound Devices on medals awarded posthumously were referred to as ‘ _really_ -hard-way stars’ were… completely true.

To add the final touches, he hung his sword from the belt-frog concealed under the tails of his sash, and pulled on his white cotton gloves. A thought suddenly occurred to him: he didn’t expect to be parading with drawn sword, but just in case, he drew the sword and practised saluting with it, sweeping it up before his face and back down to his side in front of the mirror. Alliance service had no sword tradition even for ceremonial purposes, so he still had to get comfortable with the drill. On that note, he sheathed the sword again and started practising the palm-forward hand salute of the Royal Marines. _If I am under surveillance, I might as well give ’em a laugh,_ he thought as he muttered: “longest way up, shortest way down. Longest way up, shortest way dow…”

A knock at the door made him freeze self-consciously and eventually remember to drop his arm. He opened it to reveal a subaltern labouring under the weight of an enormous aiguillette. He tried not to grin at the relieved expression on the man’s face as he braced to attention, seeing that The Colonel-Commandant was in uniform already.

“Good morning, sir. Are you ready?” Shepard gave him 8/10 for hiding his anxiety at the prospect of hearing any answer to that other than ‘yes’. He tucked his hat under his arm and steeled himself for a full day of ceremonial.

“Lead the way, lieutenant,” he told him, remembering at the last moment to pronounce it the British way.


End file.
